Don't believe those reviews . . .

FIRST: I’d really like to know what you think! Please leave a comment when you finish reading.

That was the headline in the London Sunday Times the weekend after Peter O'Toole's Macbeth opened to supremely awful reviews. Then, the article began:

". . . it's much, much worse."

That was 1980, and I still remember it. The show was sold out for the rest of the run.

Since then, I've had to learn not to believe my own reviews, since there were those who felt that, given my life of privilege, I had no business writing a memoir in which I suffered in any way. I was told to shut up and go work in a refugee camp in Africa. I was scorned for the cliché of having had an Irish nanny. It was made clear to me that someone from a famous family is only allowed to write a book about the famousness of their family, for better or (preferably) for worse. Why did I think it was acceptable to write a memoir about being a motherless daughter and put famous names in it?

So I trained myself not to read my reviews cold. But then I became my own publisher, and I had to read them. Which sent me to the Amazon page for Write What You Don't Know this morning, where I saw that we'd received our first one-star review. Here's what it said:

"Easily the worst book I've ever read. Embarassingly bad. You do not learn to write by joining workshops that teach you to be playful." — Amazon customer

I know I shouldn't let it get to me, but it does. Even though Amazon Customer can't spell and has evidently led a life of extreme reading privilege. So why am I even writing about this? Because that last sentence has stuck with me all day: "You do not learn to write by joining workshops that teach you to be playful."

Well, who says, other than Amazon Customer? The list of playful writers is long and august. Three examples, off the top of my head:

Dickens: "Mr Carker the Manager did a great deal of business in the course of the day, and stowed his teeth upon a great many people. In the office, in the court, in the street, and on 'Change, they glistened and bristled to a terrible extent. Five o'clock arriving, and with it Mr Carker's bay horse, they got on horseback, and went gleaming up Cheapside."

Austen: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

Melville: much of Moby-Dick. Though it's not exactly funny, he plays with form in what seems like every possible way, including drama and fake science. Are you not playing if you invent a Sub-Sub-Librarian who ends his list of whale quotes with "Very like a whale"?

And the drama critic for the Sunday Times. You can’t say that headline and opening isn’t playful!

But Amazon Customer is adamant. "You do not!" Well, I did. After a childhood spent reading classic novels and a First in English from Oxford, I took writing very seriously. When I began my memoir Love Child, I tried my very best to write well, and the results were stiff and pompous and dead on the page. Only when I learned to write playfully (as a result of meeting my creative collaborator and Write What You Don’t Know co-author James Navé) did I manage to write something I liked.

But Amazon Customer seems personally offended by the idea of playing, so much so that this coherent book, written in grammatical sentences and with, I hope, unexceptionable spelling, which has been praised by a PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist who teaches at Iowa Writers' Workshop and also by the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop who even used it in a workshop, is the worst book he's ever read. (I'd bet money he's a he.)

Why is the idea of writing playfully so threatening? We seem to have touched a tender spot in Amazon Customer. (Session 7 of Write What You Don’t Know is all about understanding character in terms of vulnerabilities, fears, shames, and losses: tender spots.) Obviously I don't know anything about Amazon Customer's childhood, but I'm guessing he had some traumatic experience around playing. Perhaps he was chastised unfairly for playing at some point, and swore he’d never play again. Perhaps he was told he'd only ever get anywhere by working hard. Playing is for losers! And if he didn't get where he wanted to be by those means, he’s resentful and shoots the messenger.

I'm guessing that in his world, unfortunately for him, seriousness and playfulness are opposites. If you're playing, you can't be serious. If you're serious about writing, do not play at it! So, at the heart of this criticism is a misconception about what playing actually is.

All mammals play, and many non-mammals also. When a human child or a lion cub plays, it's practicing life. Play is how we learn about the physical universe, and human socialization, with minimal risk. Play is how we develop our muscles and our physical abilities before we get old enough to put away childish things and have to go to the gym to do those things Very Seriously. Play exercises the mind. (Would Amazon Customer sneer at crossword puzzles, even the very hard ones like the London Sunday Times Mephisto?) Play promotes happiness, because it encourages a state of flow—which means that you're immersed in the present rather than stressing about the past or the future.

And play doesn't just promote creativity; it is creativity. Play is trying things you haven't tried before. Play is putting things together in new combinations and arrangements. (Doesn't that sound rather like poetry?) Play is imagining scenarios and seeing where they lead. (Doesn't that sound rather like novel-writing?)

Best of all, play is low-stakes. Play is measured by the fun you have, not by the result. This allows you to try things out on the page without feeling like you have to write well every time you pick up a pen. A writer with the desirable quality of originality doesn't sound like anybody else—and you'll never not sound like somebody else if you're focused on what you think is good writing, which by definition was written by somebody else. Originality comes from trying out new combinations of ideas and images and words, from asking yourself "what would happen if . . ." and coming up with possibilities beyond the obvious. You experiment, without being attached to the result. Isn't that playing?

That trying-out is what we at Imaginative Storm call "generating material." Professors call it "generative writing," but we prefer "material" because if you're not "writing," you're not so tempted to try to write well. You could think of generating material as like mining the clay from which you will eventually form your pot. You don't just go outside and grab some dirt and throw it on the wheel; you get high-quality clay. And if you can't buy it, which in the case of writing you can't, you have to dig it up yourself.

Micaceous clay has tiny shard of mica in it when it’s mined: like the imaginative gems buried in the material you generate.

You don't mine clay while sitting at your potter's wheel. And like many terrific writers, I can't generate material while sitting at my desk. My desk is a place of work, not play. I'm better off in an armchair, in bed, or in a coffee shop. Location supports you in brain-hacking yourself out of trying to write well. For example, Kiese Laymon, multi-prize-winning author of Heavy: An American Memoir, does his generative writing in his car. (Read a fascinating interview with him here.)

When you generate material, your intention is serious. Maybe you're generating material for a work-in-progress; maybe you're generating material just to stretch and strengthen your imagination, so that you'll become a more original, more adventurous writer—or simply a more creatively fulfilled person. Let's see what happens if I write about what wasn't there, or if I describe my brother in terms of a photo of an Escher-like bookstore in China. Do I like the results? Great if I do—I now have new, original material that I couldn't have thought up by force of will. I may also have new insights into my life, and the playfulness that brought them to me helps me take the insight more like an affectionate shove than a slap in the face.

And if I don't like any of the material I generated in that particular 10 minutes—big deal. I was just playing.

Click here for Write What You Don’t Know, the paperback.

Click here for Write What You Don’t Know, the audio course.

Click here to add our Saturday Writer Playtime online session to your calendar, and click here to add our Thursday Prompt Lab to your calendar. Both are free—and you’ll discover the value of what Amazon Customer probably never tried: a serious writing workshop that shows you how to write playfully.